Like It Or Lump It

14062012

I have a blog (really? You don’t say- ed). I have a Facebook account. I also have a Hotmail account. As well as a Gmail, Google+, YouTube, Twitter (look! >>) and UOWMail account. To add to this, I have a mobile (it’s an LG a190 if anyone’s interested) and a 4gb mp3.

a190: Not a fancy Mercedes.

At various stages throughout my life I have also been lucky enough to have been in possession of a Nintendo Gameboy, it was a black and white and I only had three games (Kid Icaris, Donkey Kong and a racing game that I could never beat and whose name escapes me at the moment) but it was gold!

Unfortunatly not worth the same as the colour it is.

I can’t forget my trusty Playstation and Playstation 2 (which I still have somewhere). I also had my own DVD player to spare the playstation, and to top it all off, I had, for a few years, a massive 86cm flat screen TV in my room. Unsurprisingly, this was the envy of all my friends for as long as I had it.

I’m building up to something here, and you may have noticed it by now. And yes, I have had, and still do, have a stereo, but no, it’s not as big as some of my friends (I’m not that lucky). But let me tell you, I love it to bits. It’s quite old now, it’s seven, but it is still the best thing that I have had. Let me explain why.

What mine looks like. With a face-lift

I’m not a movie or television buff; in fact, the only way for me to care less about TV is to go round smashing all of them I see with a sledgehammer. So that’s why I don’t miss the telly.

Because my parents, more my mum than dad, were concerned about the games that I played growing up (I was pretty much limited to racing games, hence why I was surprised that I was allowed Kid Icaris, let alone MediEvil) I never really got the chance to become addicted. So I don’t miss the various consoles.

Imagine my suprise when I got this for christmas one year.

I am not obsessive compulsive and am not the biggest sufferer of FOMO. In fact, I only signed up to Facebook after I finished high school so I could keep in touch with people (I didn’t own a mobile at that stage) and all the other social medias came because friends signed me up before telling me so and I am doing Media and Communications at uni.

I got my first mobile only because a friend won a new mobile himself, which he gave to his mum, and she in turn gave her old phone to me. It was a six year old Nokia Brick. I remember one time I dropped it from shoulder height onto a tiled floor as a dare. Being supremely confident it would survive, I did. My friends called me mad, but it still worked so I didn’t care. The only reason that I don’t have that phone today is because when I went to charge it one day, it refused to charge and the Telstra technicians that I went to see (they’re my provider), they told me it would just be cheaper to buy a new one.

Yes, I did do this a couple of times myself.

I do like my mp3, but I don’t love it. This is because it’s just a bit too easy, once you get started. You buy it, but you also have to have a computer to get the music on there. On top of this you have to have either a) the internet to download music you like/ don’t own yet; or b) the album that you want to put on there.

With a stereo, all you have to do is provide a disc, and hit play. Done. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. And if you can’t decide what you want to listen to, there’s always the radio. The stereo is also party friendly, mp3 and iPods aren’t as much.

Eventually though, you get your music on your mp3 or iPod, and then it becomes easy, press a button or two and you have a new album by a completely different artist. To me, there’s no sense of occasion in that. If you’re listening to the stereo and you want to do that, you have to change discs and that is more fun, because if you love the music you’re listening to (and who doesn’t), you won’t want to drop and scratch the disc.

I tell you all this because the other day, my friend was able to score me a few downloads. I asked him how many blank discs that I would need when I next saw him. His reply to this caught me a bit off guard. He said, “why not just by a 16gb iPod and be done with cd’s forever?”

Now I must confess that I did consider this. Briefly. For about a minute. This is because the rational side of my brain took over. If I go to a concert and am lucky enough to meet the artist (as I have been before), I could get them to sign my iPod, but it wouldn’t make sense, and wouldn’t exactly become a valuable piece of a collection, if I were to take a blank album cover by said artist though, they could sign it and it would be worth a bit in time to come.

What?! But Johansson isn’t even a musician!

So my question now is: is it weird that I still love and will continue to buy cd’s for a long time to come? Especially given the age we now live in today and the technology that I’ve been fortunate to own? Come on, I still have some mix tapes that I made myself. I don’t have any vinyl because it was well and truly out of sync with the times by the time I started making decisions on what music I wanted to by.

I love you guys

Another reason that I would much prefer my stereo over an ipod anyday? Because while there are only two songs that I will dance to in public (this one and that one), if I wanted to dance to my ipod, the headphones would keep falling out and I would quickly become frustrated at having to keep putting them back in. With a stereo I wouldn’t have to do this at all, so I could dance all night to my hearts content. Or until I run out of energy which is the most likely to happen.

Is this even possible? Or did she just super glue them to her ears?

*Please note that while this post was originally published on the 14/6/2012, the final paragraph and photo were only added on the 15/6/2012.